You look at the coupons and copy/paste each one into the coupon field on the checkout page. Most of the time, you try several and none of them work, but occasionally you strike gold. It’s a great feeling!

Honey’s goal is to streamline the process. No more hunting for coupons or painstakingly trying each one. With the Honey browser extension, all you have to do is press a button. Honey then automatically tries all working coupons and applies the best one to your order.

I joined Honey in 2013 but didn’t use it much.

I got frustrated because I use a lot of different browsers, and at first Honey only supported Chrome.

I’ve been back for a bit, but I didn’t think it’d be worth writing about until last night.

I’m going to a casino for a weekend in November and need a hotel. The Honey button popped up during the checkout process at Hotels.com. I pressed it and it automatically found all the coupons on the internet for Hotels.com, validated them, and chose the one with the highest savings.

It saved me $34! All I did was press the button and wait 20 seconds for it to find a working promo code.

So I snapped the screenshot and decided to write a Honey app review. Let’s go!

Download the extension.

Honey App

How does the Honey app work and how it is legal?

You press a button that says “Apply Coupons.” Honey validates all the coupons in its directory, picks the best one, and applies it to your order.

In my experience, most of the time none of the coupons work. Honey isn’t magic. But if there’s a working coupon out there you can be assured Honey will apply it. The app takes the grunt work out of the process.

You may be asking, “if this is a free service, what is Honey getting out of the deal?” To understand this, you need to understand affiliate marketing.

Simply put, Honey has affiliate deals with online companies, and they get a cut of your order (typically less than 5%.) But this doesn’t mean you pay more. In fact, in some cases, Honey shares a chunk of their revenue with you via cash back rewards. Learn more about cash back below.

Download the extension.

Honey App

Love

Honey makes it easy to find and get great discounts. They have a huge database of coupons and promo codes compiled from scraping the internet and from user submissions. You won’t always come away with a coupon, but if there’s one out in the wild, I’m confident Honey’s got it.

I’ve seen people asking “is Honey legit? Is it safe?” It’s definitely safe! The doubt some people have comes from misunderstanding the business model. Honey helps you find valid coupons and earns affiliate money by doing so. Also, they’re a transparent company and are very clear that they don’t sell or share your data.

Coupons on Amazon are tied to specific products. Amazon doesn’t do sitewide coupons. To combat this, Honey has specific Amazon tools to bring to the table.

Droplist. You can add an item to your “Droplist” and it’ll track the price and notify you when the price drops.

Best price feature. Amazon shows you the price that THEY choose, but it’s not always the best price. Sometimes there are better deals from third-party sellers that are hidden in the “New and Used from” section. Honey takes shipping, prime status, and the seller’s reputation into consideration and shows you the best deal.

You can get cashback from certain stores. That’s free money you’ll get after buying the item. Don’t bank on this, but consider it a nice bonus.

It’s free and that shouldn’t change. Like I said above, Honey’s happy because they’re getting their affiliate money, so they won’t feel the need to charge.

Hate

They give you cash back, but leave a lot to be desired:

Honey doesn’t tell you how much cash back you’ll get. It’s a guessing game. It’ll say something like “Today’s Offer 1-10% Back.” That’s a wide range, Ebates’ rates are changing daily but the cash back rate is static when you purchase something.

This company has been around for a while now and there’s still no phone app. This would be a hard app to pull off, but shopping on your phone could be improved. I’d like to see Honey take a shot at it.

Who is it for?

Everyone! It’s free and easy to use.

You might as well take 30 seconds to download the browser extension. If you find it too distracting or you aren’t getting the deals you’re looking for, just delete it.

While Honey can be frustrating because it had the chance to be an all-in-one shopping app and falls short with no phone app and bad cash back options, it should still be part of your online shopping routine. I use it with Ebates every time I check out.